EDITOR’S LETTER

Please, stop all this winning!

By Chuck Allen

Greetings once again from your friendly neighborhood “enemy of the people.” Have you had enough of this winning? Boy, I sure have! I never realized fixing everything could be so easy. Luckily — at least for the purveyors of an alternative reality — our national psyche is founded upon winning or losing. This helps keep things super simple; solutions can be summed up in a tweet.
The other cool thing is this: To have a winner there must be a loser. Can’t afford health insurance? Get a better job, loser. Of course, the job you leave behind will necessarily be filled by yet another loser. Which sucks, because this means there will always be losers among us. Or not. If social media is any indication, trashing losers seems to make us feel like winners while distracting us from the factual, objective reality in which we’re all being taken for a ride.
Speaking of health insurance, I’m not so sure anyone read the bill passed by those wild and crazy Republicans. I can dig it. They were itching to bust out of chambers and cruise over to the White House for some beers with the Prez in his beautiful Rose Garden. Wow — I’ll bet that was some party! Hanging out, discussing Atlas Shrugged, feeling in a particularly buoyant mood knowing that you’ve given people back their “freedom” to die uninsured. It must’ve been a really special afternoon.
But enough of all that — there’s more work to be done for the, um, eh, … people. Yeah, them. No resting on your laurels if there’s still money left to grift! I gotta hand it to you and the fearless tweeter: The marketing campaign was and is brilliant. “Make America Great Again!” Whose idea was it to leave off for whom it will be great? It’s not your fault if the poor schmucks that elected you actually believed the slogan was meant for them, right? Adding the “Again” part was a nice touch, too. When is Again. Or is it was? WHO CARES! That’s what makes it so awesome! It’s like a Dylan song — the interpretation is up to the listener (supporter). Whatever the interpretation, rest assured it’s a fantasy version of America that never existed, but WHO CARES! This is some seriously genius level shit.
I’ll bet you get endless pleasure reading freakout stories about our country’s march toward fascism, knowing that the fearless tweeter barely has the attention span of a gnat. It takes dedication and commitment to be a dictator, after all. No, focusing on fascism is part of the grift — like the gang of pickpockets in Oliver Twist on a much grander scale. It keeps everyone distracted and fighting amongst themselves while the .00001 percent liberates another few trillion from the 99.9999 percent.
Which is what they really mean when they’re talking about freedom. The freedom for us to be stupid enough to believe voodoo economics will ever work.